


the luckiest man

by daisylincs



Series: Agents of Birthdays [21]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Agents of Birthdays, Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, AoS Finale Spoilers, Characters Also Deserve All Happiness And Treats, Characters Are Hamilton Nerds, Date Nights, Established Relationship, F/M, Feels, Fluff, Gift Fic, Hamilton!, Happy Birthday Andrea!!, Introspection, Post-Finale, birthday fic, relationship introspection, so they get it, watching hamilton
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-25
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-17 17:01:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28977810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daisylincs/pseuds/daisylincs
Summary: After their official retirement from SHIELD, Mack and the team have a special present for Fitz and Jemma as a thank-you for all the years they put in.
Relationships: Alya Fitz & Leo Fitz & Jemma Simmons, Leo Fitz & Alphonso "Mack" Mackenzie, Leo Fitz/Jemma Simmons
Series: Agents of Birthdays [21]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1886911
Comments: 3
Kudos: 18





	the luckiest man

**Author's Note:**

> For [agentreeb](https://agentreeb.tumblr.com).
> 
> Dear Andrea, 
> 
> Aaah, _happy birthday,_ love!! I hope you have an absolutely artsy- _splendid_ day today 😍🥳🎨 You know, even before we started talking, I’ve noticed you around my Tumblr dashboard, and occasionally in my inbox with prompts and positivity (🥺🥰) - and, since today is your special day, let me share some special things that immediately stood out to me about you.
> 
> First of all - Andy, your ART!! Oh my gosh, I’ve always had the biggest case of heart-eyes for artists, particularly artists in fandoms, but I have a whole new level of adoration for you - because the way you sketch Fitzsimmons and their little family is just so _absolutely beautiful,_ and you capture their faces and _expressions_ in a way that just feels so like THEM!! I’ve spent many a happy minute admiring and appreciating your art through the ever-amazing Tumblr mutual bond, ah 😍😍😍
> 
> Secondly, what strikes me about you is how genuinely _fantastic_ you are to talk to - exactly the right mixture of funny, kind, AoS-fangirl-y, and all over _amazing_ , and, seriously, every second spent in your chat box is an EXCELLENT second!! 
> 
> So for your birthday today, I’ve created a bit of an emotional study in Fitzsimmons for you, because I remember you saying you enjoy that kind of writing - and I’m also finding that for me, more and more, I really enjoy exploring this style. And Fitzsimmons, of course, are the _perfect_ subjects for it, what with their effortless and so-stunning connection… Yes! So in this fic, I went down that road a little more, and also indulged my own inner fangirl by having them go on a very special date-night, too ;)) Haha, I saw Hamilton on your blog, and I just couldn’t _resist._
> 
> So, love, I hope you enjoy this short and sweet little Fitzsimmons date night, and then from the bottom of my heart - HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!! 🎊🎁🎈🎂😍

"Turbo, do you have a moment?" 

At the sound of Mack's voice, Fitz paused mid-scolding Alya for sneaking another cupcake onto her plate. The retirement party was small and simple - just him, Jemma, the team, and a few old colleagues and professors from Academy days - but there still managed to be an _alarming_ amount of sugar for Alya to ingest. 

And, sure, Fitz was all for spoiling his daughter every now and then - God knew she deserved to try all the Earthen sweets and treats after four and a half years in space. But there was a difference between _trying_ new treats and _stuffing_ herself with them, and, to Fitz's paternal dismay, the rest of the team didn't seem to understand that fact. 

No joke, he had even seen May - _May -_ smiling indulgently as she let Alya pile up on chocolate brownies! 

It was unbelievable, and the thought of all those extra kilojoules of sugar in his daughter's system was already giving him a headache. Didn't his friends get that she needed a balanced diet, too?! 

But Mack was calling, and for the moment, that overruled his frustration-slash-worry about his daughter's eating habits. 

"I'll take her, you go see what Mack wants," Jemma said tactfully, glimpsing the look in his eyes and holding out her arms to Alya. 

Always delighted to be picked up, especially by her mother, Alya put down her plate (the extra cupcake along with it, fortunately) and threw herself into Jemma's arms. 

"Let's go say hi to Aunt Daisy for a little bit, shall we?" Jemma asked, shifting Alya a bit higher up onto her hip and giving her a smile full of so much warmth and tenderness that every slight hint of annoyance faded completely from Fitz's being. 

He found himself smiling with equal fondness as he turned around, putting down his bottle of Bendeery's and making his way across the room to Mack. 

His friend was waiting for him, a welcoming smile already pulling at his lips as Fitz walked up.

Fitz's own smile broadened, and he was just about to reach out and clap Mack on the shoulder when he saw that, _bloody hell,_ he had a large, white envelope in his hands. 

He stopped dead, and his expression must have been pretty good, because Mack laughed and said, "Don't worry, Turbo, this is still your retirement _party,_ I'm not getting into the legal stuff yet." 

Fitz blew out a small sigh of relief, and Mack punched him lightly in the shoulder (which, given that he was _Mack-sized,_ actually hurt a decent amount.)

"Ow," Fitz grumbled, rubbing the spot and glaring up at his friend. "Don't you act like you don't hate paperwork, too!" 

"Oh, I definitely hate paperwork," Mack agreed with a small shudder. When he looked down to meet Fitz's gaze, though, his eyes were soft. "But I'm willing to do it every now and then for a friend."

Touched, Fitz punched Mack lightly in the shoulder - _actually_ lightly, this time. "That's sweet." 

"Yeah, well, the team and I were thinking," Mack said, brushing his finger along the sealed edge of the envelope. "You two have done so much for SHIELD, and for _us_ , that it seems wrong to just… send you off. Because, yeah, you'll have your retirement pension, and extra consultancy fees if you ever want or need them, but still… you're _you."_

He paused for a quick breath, and when he met Fitz's eyes again, his gaze was full of raw, sincere emotion. "And you've given more to this team than you probably even realise. So we just… we wanted to send you off with something special." 

He raised the envelope in his right hand, giving a small nod as he handed it over to Fitz. 

"You didn't have to," Fitz said, taking it and turning it over slowly in his hands. 

Mack's voice, and his eyes, were full of softness; _caring._ "Yeah, we did," he said simply. 

Fitz smiled, half nostalgic and half deeply fond, ducking his head so he could see what he was doing with the envelope. 

Slowly, carefully, he tugged it open, tipping it down so whatever was inside fell out into his palm - 

He gasped out _loud._

His eyes huge, Fitz looked up, still holding the simple contents of the envelope on his flat palm. "Mack, this is…" 

"We did say _special,"_ Mack pointed out, his grin a mixture of affectionate and amused.

Fitz shook his head slowly, a mixture of gratitude, amazement and awe filling him with an incredulous kind of happiness. He meant to say something like, _thank you, this is more than we could ever have dreamed of, this is perfect_ \- but what came out of his mouth instead was, "Daisy is going to be _so_ jealous." 

Mack laughed, the sound rich and warm, and though there was a gleam of nostalgia in his gaze, it was dwarfed out completely by fondness. "Nah, I think she'll be okay if you let her babysit Alya for the evening." 

Fitz nodded, smiling past the sudden heavy lump in his throat. "Thank you so much, Mack," he said, his voice catching slightly, and then he was stepping forward and throwing his arms around his friend. 

Mack reciprocated immediately, squeezing in one of his infamous bone-crushing hugs - but Fitz found that he didn't even mind the slight crack of his ribs, not today. 

"You go enjoy those with your wife, yeah?" Mack said into the hug, his voice slightly muffled by Fitz's shirt, but still more than audible, the affection in his tone coming through the clearest. 

"I most definitely will," Fitz promised. 

//

The next day, at exactly six-thirty PM, a top-of-the-line SHIELD quinjet offloaded two passengers in a quiet side alley just a few minutes' walk from Midtown Manhattan's Lincoln Centre. 

Specifically: the quinjet dropped off Leo Fitz and Jemma Simmons just a few blocks away from the biggest Broadway theatre, where, in a special, limited-time return, Lin Manuel Miranda's _Hamilton_ was showing at seven that night. 

"I can't _believe_ this," Jemma breathed beside him, her tone a mixture of awed and delighted - and honestly, that was the perfect summary of how Fitz felt. 

He patted the pocket of his crisp black suit, where Mack's envelope and its treasure of two Hamilton tickets was tucked safely away. "Me either," he said wryly. "But it's _incredible,_ don't you think?" 

"Oh, _definitely,"_ Jemma agreed, smoothing down her chic black midi-dress and shooting him a bright, warm smile. 

He offered his arm to her, half in a mockery of the Regency novels she had spent so much time telling him about during her pregnancy with Alya (in her defence, she had been very hormonal, and there hadn't been much to _do_ at the time, stuck as they were in deep space on the Zephyr) but the other half in complete sincerity. "Shall we, wife?" 

She slipped her arm through his, her smile brightening with affectionate pleasure. "We shall, husband." 

And they did. 

Both of them were grinning hugely as they stepped into the private box Mack had booked for them - and even as they settled into the fancy velvet-backed chairs and accepted glasses of champagne, Fitz still couldn't quite believe it. 

It was only when the unmistakable first notes of Alexander Hamilton - _dun dundundundun dundundundun da da daa da -_ rang through the hall, that it really sank in for Fitz. 

They were here. They were here, they were together, and most importantly… they didn't have anything _else_ they needed to do, no worlds to save and no solutions to frantically design. 

He caught Jemma's eye, both of them grinning so hard that they couldn't think of anything else. And when Aaron Burr sang the first lyrics, Fitz and Jemma were right there with him - _"How does a bastard, orphan…"_

Fitz couldn't remember the last time he had seen Jemma smile _this_ widely, and look this… _carefree._ Because, sure, she had smiled a lot on board the Zephyr, especially when Alya came, but even then there had been this underlying air of tension, the tiniest of worried creases in her brow, the smallest hint of apprehension hiding between the smile-crinkles around her eyes. 

But now… now, as she sat in a VIP box alternately sipping her champagne, holding his hand, and mouthing along to the musical's lyrics, there was _none_ of that in the delighted lines of her smile. 

"What's the matter, Fitz?" she asked quietly, resting her hand on his knee and giving him a concerned look. She was still smiling, but there was a question in her brown eyes, too. 

"Nothing," he told her, leaning forward and kissing her quickly on the cheek. "Absolutely nothing." 

And then, because he _could,_ he leaned a little further and snuck a proper kiss, looping his fingers into her soft, styled curls of hair with the chorus singing _"in New York you can be a new man…"_ on the stage right behind them. 

"You just look happy," he said simply, pulling away after a moment to give her a tender look, his fingers lingering on her cheek as he gently brushed her hair behind her ears again. 

Jemma bit her lip, but she was smiling again, the expression entirely full of happiness and affection. "I am," she replied just as simply, holding his gaze with undisguised fondness. 

It was probably a terrible, obnoxious idea, but he kissed her again, soft and sweet and slow. 

Jemma kissed him back for a glorious minute, her grip on his knee tightening as she shifted forwards in her seat, moving so that she was practically sitting in his lap. 

But then _Satisfied_ began to play, and though she was still more than a little out of breath from their kiss, she gave his chest a little push and settled reluctantly back into her seat. 

"I think Daisy might actually murder us if we miss more than a minute of Hamilton, no matter what the excuse," she said wryly, though her eyes were bright with amused affection. 

Fitz gave a grumbling sort of sigh, but he had to admit she had a point. Renée Elise Goldsberry was on stage in front of them, and the whole cast was just getting into motion for the _Rewind_ sequence, and, yeah, okay, they couldn't miss this. 

Pirate recordings on YouTube with that one wanker's head constantly in the way couldn't even come close to this - this was, as Daisy would put it, _fucking amazing._

(And it was so fucking amazing, Fitz thought, that even _May_ would let her off without a glare if she'd been here.) 

Beside him, Jemma squeezed his hand, her eyes bright. "We're two very, very lucky people," she said, sporting an expression that could only be called _radiant_ as she watched Angelica and Hamilton's first meeting play out below them. 

Fitz hummed his agreement, sparing a second to check on his smartwatch that the seven cloaked DWARVES they had brought along were still in prime positions - come on, they were going to see Hamilton, there was no _way_ they were leaving here without a decent, all-angles recording of the experience. 

Hey, they might be retiring from SHIELD, but they hadn't _quite_ left yet - and, besides, the DWARVES were theirs. 

_Plus,_ Fitz was pretty sure Mack wanted this recording just as much as Daisy did, whether he'd admit it or not, so they wouldn't be getting any trouble from _him._

But even as the rest of the evening passed in a blur of Lin-Manuel Miranda's genius, those words of Jemma's stayed in the back of Fitz's mind. 

And, when they were walking out of the theatre hand in hand, both of them more than slightly teary-eyed, they suddenly came to the forefront of his thoughts again. 

Tonight had been… well, it had been _incredible,_ and Fitz couldn't remember the last time he had felt this… _normal._ Not the Hamilton part - that was exceptional, and he'd always appreciate it - but rather the _rest_ of the evening, the dressing up with Jemma, the going out together, just because they _wanted_ to, and not for a mission or an undercover op, or anything like that. 

He didn't think they had _ever_ done something like this before, actually - their one and only date had been, well, suffice it to say that it hadn't been anything close to normal. And what with missions, LMDs, Frameworks, space-and-time-bending, and Alya, they hadn't exactly had the time to try anything like it again… 

"We should do this again," he said suddenly, squeezing Jemma's hand where it swung between them, laced with his. 

She quirked her eyebrows, her smile fond but a little wry. "Well, I'd love to, Fitz, but while I'm sure Mack's going to give us a more than generous retirement pension, I don't think we'll _quite_ be able to pull off another Hamilton." 

"No, no, I don't mean _that,"_ he answered, snorting a laugh and shaking his head. "God, yeah, no. I _wish."_

"I meant _this,"_ he said simply, looking up to meet her eyes, then back down to their joined hands. "Just you and me, together, no pressure and no worries, no missions and no worlds to save." 

Jemma's gaze softened, and her smile was full of a deep, warm affection as she held his gaze, stepping a little closer to him and bumping his shoulder softly with hers. "I'd like that," she said quietly. 

They walked in comfortable silence for a moment, both of them letting the idea settle, letting it sink in that this was something they could _do,_ now, if they wanted. They didn't _have_ to run themselves ragged working on a solve for an impossible solution, and stay awake till three or four AM running on blind panic and too much coffee… it was like he had said on the Zephyr, they could just _be._

Except, this time, they were on _Earth,_ surrounded by the muffled laughter and chatter from the insides of houses and restaurants, breathing in the fresh night air and all the smells of frying food, spices and city it brought with it, and bathed in the gentle golden glow of ambient light from the streetlights they walked by. 

It was… special felt like too cliché of a word to use, but honestly, that was what it felt like, more than anything else. 

Being with Jemma, quiet and content and just being _them,_ with no worries or pressures for perhaps the first time in both of their lives, felt _special._

And after all, Fitz reflected dryly, even if it _was_ a slightly cliché thought, goodness knew they had been through enough to let them have at least that. 

Beside him, Jemma squeezed his hand; her subtle way of easing him out of his thought process before she said what she wanted to say. "What's made you think of that?" she asked, and there was no judgment in her tone, only genuine and fond curiosity. 

He swung their joined hands between them, appreciating the way their shadows made little patterns in the orangey glow of a streetlight. "Oh, I've just been thinking a lot, what with the retirement," he said at length, raising one shoulder. "It's going to be… a massive change." 

She made a small him of agreement, but he raised their joined hands in front of them _\- hold on, I'm not finished yet._

Her lips tugging up slightly in amusement, and her eyes crinkling with those affectionate little smile lines he loved so much, Jemma gave his hand a little tug - silently saying, _well, finish, then._

Meeting her gaze directly, he did just that. "It's going to be a massive change," he repeated, "but not everything about it is going to be bad. At all." 

Jemma held his gaze for a long moment, then nodded once, slowly - and though there was something wistful in her gaze, it was dwarfed almost completely by love, and _contentment._

He hadn't been the only one who had enjoyed tonight, he knew that much. 

"I think you're right," Jemma said, with another, firmer nod. 

She was silent for a moment, just looking at their interlaced fingers, and it was one of those rare non-work-related moments that he knew exactly and without a shred of doubt what was going through her mind. 

She was thinking about everything they had been through together, all the years it had taken them to get their, and how many times they had almost _not_ made it - and, probably, lingering on the one time they, or he at any rate, hadn't made it. 

He didn't say a word, instead letting her sort through it all on her own - God knew it was a lot to let go of. 

But they would never _really_ let go of it all, would they? All the years, everything that had built them up to this moment, would always be a part of them. 

And maybe… maybe that wasn't a bad thing. There were things he would go back and change in an _instant_ if he had the chance to, things he wished he could make disappear with a snap of his fingers, or the flick of a switch, like the Framework shutting down… but then there were also things that he would never, _never_ change, no matter what it ultimately cost him. Meeting Jemma was first and foremost on that list. 

And in the end… it all balanced out, didn't it? Everything they had been through had brought them here, and it had shaped them a certain way, given them ghosts they would never be able to shake - but it had _also_ given them a deep and profound appreciation for the quiet moments, the good moments, the moments like _this._

He didn't think they'd ever lose that appreciation, that _thankfulness_ for every moment they got to spend just with each other. 

But maybe that was a good thing, too. 

Jemma caught his eye, and he knew she had just been thinking something along very, very similar lines. "We're such lucky people," she said again, repeating her words from earlier the night, and again, Fitz nodded his heartfelt agreement. 

They really _were_ incredibly lucky. 

And, yes, he had just come back from seeing _Hamilton_ , of all the fantastic experiences - but it was _this_ that meant the most to him. Just this, the two of them, Jemma's hand in his and her head on his shoulder as they strapped back into the quinjet, and, later, the warmth of her smile when they were back in the Lighthouse for a last time, and she collected Alya from Daisy's room, fast asleep and with a smile on her face. 

Yeah, Hamilton had been an amazing experience, downright bloody incredible in fact - but _this_ was what made him the luckiest man, on any planet. 

_**The End.** _


End file.
